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The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#131

Post by qwerty456127 »

Benji_San wrote: post #121
qwerty456127 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive licen…

The "copying fees" on storage (this includes harddrives/SSDs, phones, CD/DVD/BD or pretty much any storage medium in some countries) is actually a fee for "private copying" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy ) not pirate copying. Historically these fees were introduces with cassettes as it was possible to obtain private copies by recording radio broadcasts and by copying a cassette. I suppose it did…

Nice explanation, thanks. Nevertheless some countries have just introduced these laws recently and there probably are more countries to follow.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#132

Post by wongarsu »

nicoburns wrote: post #65
rgj wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition…

Here in the UK we don't seem to have this problem for some reason (possibly strong student unions?). I have studied at 3 different universities, and none of them required me to spend more than £100 total in course materials for a year. For mathematics, all of my course materials were available in PDF format for free (which I could then print myself if I wished to). For Philosophy, the majority of readings were availa…

At my University in Germany maybe 10% of professors required a textbook (usually their own), and they were always reasonably priced (20€-40€, depending on size). Also the university library always stocked a healthy amount of those books, enough for maybe 10-20% of the students taking that course. Usually the library either didn't run out of books, or you could still get a copy at a more distant library.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#133

Post by breck »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #48

I personally adore Sci-Hub and Libgen but that's because such is my personal alignment - I believe no such concept as "intellectual property" should exist and right (which, from my point of view, is unlimited sharing of what is usually copyrighted in this case) is more important than legal. To support my stance I can cite the German phenomenon (many attribute it's 19th century industrial growth to unconstrained knowl…

You are not the first to logically argue that the IP concept should not exist. The problem is the people behind IP laws benefit tremendously from the lie and don’t have incentive to examine the system more closely. It would be like if tobacco makers called cigarettes “health sticks” and successfully convinced the world of the lie.

If we ever hope to change things we need to go on the offensive, and that starts with speaking the truth and never using the false terms put forward by the industry. So say Intellectual Monopoly laws instead of IP. If someone is insistent on making the property analogy, agree with them and tell them there is a term that actually is more truthful than IP: intellectual slavery.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#134

Post by fbn79 »

jononor wrote: post #67
fbn79 wrote: post #28

Why not a low cost subscription app like Spotify that rewards the publishers (and I hope, by conseguence Authors and Reviewers)? This would be appetible to more general academy world (even low grade schools) and even small business that do research and development. And could create a more virtuose author/reviewers gratification.

I think the ability to pay a monthly fee, as an individual, to sponsor research would be great. But if you allow the publishers to continue to be the middleman, they will continue to be in power and will take most of the cut. I would not buy such a product, on principle. The authors and reviewers are the ones that provide the vast majority of the value. So the monetary (and social) reward structure should be centered…

I think publishers are important in the review system giving authorities to publications. Without publishers (with the platform being the only publisher) we loose the "authority system". Without publishers we will be in a system more like wikipedia. We can base it on peer reviewer authority, but the platform and scientific comunity will need to fix rules to when recognize a pubblication as "reviewed and accepted". Thinking more about it, we are in the field of blockchains tecnologies. Every university or similar institution can be a node, when more then ...% of nodes acccept the reviewed pubblication (manual work of check the paper and the peer review) it can be considered "officially approved" and added to the blockchain.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#135

Post by this_was_posted »

Topolomancer wrote: post #5

I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub. Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced…

even better, add this as a bookmark and you're only one click away from a PDF:

javascript:window.location='https://sci-hub.tw/'+window.location

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#136

Post by phicoh »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #111
juliendorra wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). The idea is that the private copy exemption is lowering sales, and this tax balance these sales. Doesn’t make a lot of sense (who was buying several copies of the same vinyl or…

> In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). Why are you meant to compensate anybody for your rights? Why not compensate potential robbers for outlawing robberies then? They could be more rich and happy if the law didn't…

The way it works in Europe, is that copyright is implicit: you create something, you get copyright. With copyright you get to control who can copy your work. Copyright is more seen as a natural right then as a law that has an economic purpose.

Then there are a number of exceptions where blanket permission to copy is granted in return for some financial compensation for the creators.

Where all of this goes wrong is that there is not a clear legal framework how creators should receive money and especially how much they should get.

As somebody buying blank media, how the creators are compensated is not really an issue, but the total amount of money that gets collected is.

In particular, the money is meant to compensate for legal copies under the relavant section of the copyright law.

For example, essentially nobody makes legal copies of copyrighted material to DVD-R. You cannot legally copy DVDs, so the money should compensate for music files, analog video tapes, televsion, scans of paper books, etc. That happens so little that there should not be an additional tax in DVD-R

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#137

Post by goatkarma »

nguoi wrote: post #129
goatkarma wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely a possibility. Our Security team have a quite rigourous follow-up process and that's never been raised but absolutely not out the realms of possibility. However some accounts for users in non academic departments have been used previously too. I can guarantee Sandra in HR has no interest in open science :-D I should note that I am a huge advocate for OA and thinks the who journal ecosystem is a rotte…

I think you should have indicated that you weren't certain in the original accusation.

I'm not sure if you caught the above comment but I can be certain that professonal services staff (HR, admin etc) who's accounts have been used by Scihub definitely did not give their credentials voluntarily. They have zero interest in Scihub or access to material.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#138

Post by Cyph0n »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #84
maeln wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than unde…

That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive licen…

> even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country

This baffles me, especially for Netflix original content. Is it because they think the UI would get cluttered?

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#139

Post by ElFitz »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #84
maeln wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than unde…

That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive licen…

> Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works.

We have that over here. Said taxes also apply to hard drives, iPhones internal storage, etc

BUT it isn't meant to compensate for illegal downloads (the music & film industry tried, but I believe it was the EU that told them that was illegal). It's supposed to compensate for the supposed loss occurred from people's right to make private copies of legally obtained copyrighted materials.

It's whacked and non-sensical, but still. We are after all the country where you have to pay artists copyright associations for playing copyleft music in your shop.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#140

Post by roter »

tgvaughan wrote: post #127
Topolomancer wrote: post #5

I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub. Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced…

I too am part of a well funded university, arguably one of the richest in Europe, and we were recently informed that it's possible we won't have a Nature subscription this year. Of course the reasons are complex, and there'll no doubt be a workaround arranged, but it goes to show that even the most fortunate of us aren't necessarily immune to needing sci-hub to get work done.

Scihub would have been a godsend when I was doing my PhD. I would have to request via inter-library-loan all the low-exposure journal articles for which my library had no subscription. When the paper finally came in, via fax or scan, I may have already gone a different route. Or went to play ultimate frisbee.
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